Going South: On Documentary as a Form of Cognitive Geography

Our comprehension of the kind of world we live in is conditioned by many factors, including our knowledges of other places and our geographical vocabularies—the schemes we employ to identify location near and far, at local, regional, and further levels beyond. The twentieth century transformed our knowledge of other places and has given us new but confusing and contradictory vocabularies and concepts. For one thing, we travel more and further. We should not idealize this. Travel expands our horizons, but we always carry the baggage of our subjectivity with us and often fail to see what we don't want to see. Nor should we forget that travel is undertaken for different purposes: tourism, business, pilgrimage, migration, exile . . . and making documentaries. Each implies a different perspective, partly because each implies a different relationship to both the destination and to the place called home. We also know more of other places because we see many more of them on our screens than ever before. Indeed, this is where cinema began, at the very moment of its inception in the 1890s, when the Lumière brothers set the pattern by sending their agents around the world, not only to introduce their invention in practically every major city of the day, but also to bring back "exotic" imagery to tantalize their rapidly growing audiences back home. Television followed and extended cinema in picturing the four corners of the world, a process which accelerated in the mid-1960s with the introduction of satellite communications, allowing for the global transmission of television signals. Instantaneity is also the modus operandi of the development and global spread of the Internet over the last twenty years. At each of these stages, the screen as a representational space undergoes a subtle transformation, as the process of symbolic coding is remediated. Conceptually, we are entering the territory—not an accidental metaphor—of what is called cognitive mapping: the construction of mental maps which encode the relative relationships between different locations in the spatial environment. A term introduced in the late 1940s by the behavioral psychologist Edward Tolman, and then taken up in disciplines like geography, archeology, architecture, and urban planning,¹ forty years later it acquires another dimension in the hands of the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, who speaks of it as a process whereby individual subjects situate themselves within the wider and unrepresentable totality. Cognitive mapping thereby possesses a crucial ideological component, because it involves (following Althusser and Lacan) the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to their Real conditions of existence.² Documentary cinema in this light is a representational space which is loosely structured by three levels of inscription: the ostensive content of the image on the screen, the implied relationships produced by montage (the "language" of cinema), and the implicit but hidden categories of the ideological.

What does this mean for the study of documentary cinema beyond the metropolitan center? While the basic outlines of the history of documentary are well enough established, most accounts nonetheless give a very incomplete and unbalanced view of it, because they commit a sin of omission: they do not escape what Edward Said called the imaginary geography with which the West sees the East, subjective visions in which the gaze is asymmetrical because it only goes one way.³ In other words, they tend to think in terms of documentary as a form which not only originates in the metropolis (which is true enough) but whose development is essentially a question of extending the outward gaze. They fail to ask about the return of the gaze, or rather, what happens when those who have been distant subjects of the occidental camera take up the camera themselves and turn it on their own Real conditions of existence.

This imbalance can even be seen in the case of crucial moments in the development of documentary back in the metropolis. Take the decisive turn at the end of the 1950s, when a new generation of portable film gear appeared, and it finally became possible to film almost anywhere with synchronous sound, handheld cameras, and even...